by Jeffrey Spencer | Jun 7, 2026 | Sermons |
CLICK HERE for a worship video for June 7
Sermon for the Second Sunday after Pentecost – June 7, 2026
Matthew 9:9-13, 18-26
Dear friends, grace to you and peace from God our Father and our Lord Jesus Christ.
We have three stories in quick succession in our gospel reading for today, and what ties them together is a tragic spiritual condition which some theologians refer to as “cooties.” (When I say, “some theologians,” I mean me.) You know how cooties works: when someone has them, you stay away from them so that you don’t become infected with them yourself! There is the playground version of this, where children avoid the opposite sex or the oddball or the new kid, but there are many, many adult versions as well. We human beings have a tendency to turn away from others, particularly from various kinds of human brokenness – afraid that it might infect us too.
The Bible is rife with outbreaks of cooties, only in the Bible it isn’t called that. In the Bible it is called being unclean. Whether you were ritually unclean or morally unclean or physically unclean, you were to be avoided. Close contact with an unclean person made you unclean too! To be unclean not only made you unfit for relationships with others; you were also thought to be unfit for a relationship with God.
The three stories we have in our gospel reading for today each feature Jesus encountering various strains of spiritual cooties, different types of uncleanliness, and in each of them, instead of turning away from the afflicted, Jesus turns towards them. Instead of Jesus catching cooties, they catch Jesus! By his turning towards them in mercy, they are made clean and given a new life.
First up we have Matthew. Matthew was a tax collector. As a tax collector, Matthew had moral cooties. He was morally compromised. We often think of Matthew as the modern equivalent of an IRS agent, but it is worse than that. (Sorry to any IRS agents listening today.) The issue wasn’t merely that he collected taxes, but that he was doing so as a collaborator with Rome, who had invaded and pillaged and occupied Israel, their Promised Land. And so, tax collectors were thought of as traitors to their own people.
Most Jews marked and avoided tax collectors. But not Jesus. Jesus went right up to Matthew’s tax booth and said to him, “Follow me.” Matthew got up and followed Jesus, leaving his old life behind.
Later, Jesus sat down and ate dinner with him. There were other tax collectors and sinners in attendance too. We need to understand that rabbis didn’t just sit down with unclean people and share dinner with them, dipping their bread into the common bowls and rubbing elbows with them. This was a prime vector for spreading cooties!
Most rabbis wouldn’t do that, but Jesus did – and when the Pharisees saw it, they couldn’t believe their eyes. They asked some of the disciples, “Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?” And Jesus, overhearing them, explained, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick.”
With this statement, Jesus acknowledged that these guys he was eating with were not well. They were indeed unclean. Jesus doesn’t make light of their sin. He doesn’t excuse it or justify it or redefine it. He certainly doesn’t encourage it. Instead, he is there eating and drinking with them so that he might cleanse them by his mercy and call them into a new life with him. And at least in Matthew’s case, that’s exactly what happened. He followed Jesus into a new life. Instead of Jesus catching his cooties, Matthew caught Jesus!
Next up we have a woman who had been suffering from hemorrhages for twelve years. Talk about unclean! In the ancient world a woman’s regular cycle rendered her unclean for a limited time each month. This uncleanliness was not a moral issue, as it was with the tax collectors and sinners. This was a natural process related to fertility – a good thing. This, rather, was a hygienic matter. Any time there was blood outside of the body, it was a major concern. You were expected to stay away from others. You were expected to stay home from synagogue. This woman had been dealing with these hemorrhages non-stop for twelve years! This meant twelve years of social and religious isolation. This meant constantly having people turn away from her.
But not Jesus. When this woman reached out for Jesus’ cloak as he passed by, when she reached out in faith and touched him with her unclean hand, Jesus didn’t turn away. Instead, he turned towards her! Instead of avoiding her, he spoke to her. He said, “Take heart, daughter, your faith has made you well.” Her bleeding stopped. Her life was restored. Her faith in Christ made her well. Instead of Jesus catching her cooties, she caught Jesus!
Finally, we have the most difficult story of the three. A leader of the synagogue came up to Jesus, begging for his help. His daughter had just died. He asked Jesus to come lay hands on her, so that she would live. Jesus went to the house where the girl was. There was already a crowd of mourners there. There were already flute-players playing a funeral dirge. When Jesus told the crowd to go away, that she was not dead but sleeping, they all laughed at him. Jesus went into the house where this precious daughter laid still in her bed.
Blood was bad enough when it came to uncleanliness, but a dead body was a whole new level of unclean. The Jewish Mishnah describes a human corpse as “the father of the father of all uncleanliness.” It was considered the ultimate impurity. Touching the dead made you unclean for seven days, and then there was a complex rite of purification you had to go through to be made clean again. And so nobody wanted to be near the dead. Aside from perhaps her parents, everyone would have turned away from this precious little girl’s body to avoid being made unclean.
But not Jesus. Jesus went right up to her. Jesus took her by the hand, and she got up. She was no longer a dead body to be avoided; she was now full of life once again. Instead of Jesus catching her cooties, she caught Jesus. She was filled with life from him.
These three stories, in one way or another, reflect our own stories, our own lives. Sin continues to mess up our relationships with others and our relationship with God. We are sick with it and need to be made well. Many have experienced how debilitating and isolating it is when we are physically sick or when our bodies don’t work the way they are supposed to. We all have, or will, lose loved ones. Most of us already know well the somber notes of the funeral liturgy.
But instead of turning away from us in our brokenness and need, our Lord Jesus turns towards us.
Jesus turns towards us through his Word, forgiving us for our sin and calling us to follow him. He calls us away from our old lives and into new life with him.
Jesus Christ continues to eat and drink with sinners, rubbing elbows with us, taking all that is unclean in us upon himself and giving us his holiness in return.
Jesus comes to us through these means of grace that we might take hold of him, that we might reach out to him in faith and touch his cloak, and in so doing be made whole again, restored to fellowship with one another and fellowship with God.
Jesus has come to show us that he has power even over death, and so when the final uncleanliness comes, he will not turn away. He will instead take us by the hand and raise us up to eternal life.
Jesus is not concerned about catching your cooties. He instead wants you to catch him! And so instead of turning away from us, he turns towards us, making us clean, and holy, and alive.
Thanks be to God. Amen.
Rev. Jeffrey R. Spencer
Oak Harbor Lutheran Church
by Jeffrey Spencer | May 31, 2026 | Sermons |
CLICK HERE for a worship video for May 31
Sermon for Holy Trinity Sunday – May 31, 2026
Genesis 1:1-2:4a, 2 Corinthians 13:11-13, Matthew 28:16-20
Dear friends, grace to you and peace from our Triune God: Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
This is the one Sunday on the church calendar devoted to a doctrine, to a church teaching. On Holy Trinity Sunday we celebrate that God has revealed himself to us as one God existing as three persons, as a blessed Trinity.
Some congregations will recite the Athanasian Creed today – one of the ecumenical creeds alongside the Apostles Creed and the Nicene Creed. While each of these creeds are trinitarian, describing the three-fold nature and being of God, it is the Athanasian Creed which describes the Trinity in the greatest detail, going to great lengths to do so. It took up two full pages in the old LBW, our previous book of worship. It isn’t even included in the new book, to our shame. We aren’t going to recite the Athanasian Creed this morning, but I do want to give you a taste of it. It begins with these words:
Now this is the catholic (or universal Christian) faith:
That we worship one God in trinity and the trinity in unity,
neither blending their persons
nor dividing their essence.
For the person of the Father is a distinct person,
the person of the Son is another,
and that of the Holy Spirit still another.
But the divinity of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is one,
their glory equal, their majesty coeternal.
And a little later it says:
Nothing in this trinity is before or after,
nothing is greater or smaller;
in their entirety the three persons
are coeternal and coequal with each other.
So in everything, as was said earlier,
we must worship their trinity in their unity
and their unity in their trinity.
As strange and convoluted as this might sound, this is foundational Christian theology. It articulates the nature and being of God as one God who has been revealed to us in three persons. You don’t need to understand it in a logical sense – in fact, you can’t understand it in that way! It is ultimately a mystery! But it is essential to believe that this is who God really is! The Father is God, Jesus is God, the Holy Spirit is God, AND there is only one God.
You can’t really explain a mystery, but perhaps a simple symbol can help here, a simple shape. The Trinity has often been represented as a triangle. You can see a couple of triangles representing the Trinity in your bulletin for today. There’s one on the cover. There’s one in the middle pages. You also see a triangle design on the screen today.
Other shapes or designs are used to illustrate the Trinity too. For example, you often see three interlocking circles, such as we see on our banner for Trinity Sunday. Circles have no beginning and no ending, and so they represent eternity. With three of them connected to each other you get a picture of a triune, eternal God. It is wonderful symbolism for the Trinity. The shapes in this design work too. But I can’t help but notice that if you were to superimpose a frame over those circles, you would get a triangle! When there are three of them connected to each other in that way, even there you have a triangle!
I am the furthest thing from an engineer. I have two sons who have Engineering degrees, and how they managed to do that with my DNA in them is a mystery to me second only to the Trinity. But my engineering major sons will tell you that the strongest shape in engineering is a triangle. You see it in the design of roofs. You see it in trusses for bridges. You see it in braces that hold up square and rectangle-shaped walls. You never want to be on scaffolding that doesn’t have some triangles somewhere, because on their own those other shapes tend to topple over! But not triangles. Triangles are stable. Triangles exist in perfect structural balance, evenly distributing tension. Triangles are foundational.
In the same way, the doctrine of the Holy Trinity is foundational for Christian theology. It holds up other important Christian teachings, such as the divinity of Jesus. It gives us the theological structure by which to claim that Jesus is God while also claiming that there is only one God.
Some critics of Christianity, and even some within Christianity, like to point out that the word Trinity never appears in scripture, like that’s some big gotcha. But that’s beside the point. The word “Trinity” is just a word describing the shape of God that we find in scripture. The word “Trinity” is a word referring to the triangle shape of this one-in-three and three-in-one God we find over and over again as God reveals himself to us in this way in his Word.
We find this triangle shape in the very first verses of the Bible. We see the Trinity at work already in the first chapter of Genesis. When God created the heavens and the earth, a wind swept over the waters. The word “wind” here can also be translated as Spirit. They are the exact same word in both Hebrew and Greek! God the Father is with his Spirit at the very beginning!
Where is the Son? Well, God created the world by speaking. “Let there be light!” God said, and there was light. “Let there be waters and dry land and living creatures,” and they all came to be. God creates by his Word. We know from the gospel of John that “in the beginning the Word was with God and the Word was God.” We also learn from John that this same Word “became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, as the glory of a father’s only son.” The same Word of God that created all things became flesh in the person of Jesus Christ.
And so from the very first verses of the Bible, at the very beginning of creation, before anything else existed, there was this foundational triangle shape of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
We also find this triangle shape in our reading from Second Corinthians, where St. Paul blesses the Christians in Corinth with a three-fold blessing, saying, “The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with you all.” The God Paul is invoking here is three, and yet one.
We find this triangle shape most clearly in our gospel reading, where Jesus himself commands us to go and make disciples of all nations by baptizing them in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Note that the word “name” is singular. There is one name, because there is one God, but God’s name is threefold. God’s proper name, Jesus says, is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. This is the name in which we are to baptize. This is the name of the God who claims us in those waters. This is who God is. Jesus himself has made God known to us as a Holy Trinity, as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. This is not merely a metaphor. This is not a cultural relic which can be changed at will. This is a revelation from the One who has all authority in heaven and on earth! And so, this is foundational! It is foundational to Christian theology. It is foundational to the Christian church.
It is foundational for us as individual Christians too. It is foundational for our lives.
You see, the same Holy Trinity who called creation into existence, also called YOU into existence. The same Trinity who spoke life into being spoke you into being too! To believe this is to believe that your life has meaning and purpose and value. To believe this is to believe that you are not a cosmic accident. To believe this is to believe that God himself wanted one of you and wants you still. Believing this, trusting that it is true, is foundational for our lives!
The same Holy Trinity Paul invokes in his blessing over the Christians in Corinth is spoken over you in the Apostolic Greeting which has become part of the Christian liturgy. Every week this Holy Trinity blesses you with the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ to cover your sin, with the love of God the Father to fill your heart, and with the communion of the Holy Spirit to draw you into fellowship with God and with God’s people.
The same Holy Trinity Jesus names as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit makes you his own when baptism is bestowed in this Holy Name, when this name is put on you. The same Holy Trinity continues to teach us to live as disciples, to live in obedience to everything Jesus has commanded us. The same Holy Trinity promises to be with us always, even to the end of the age.
To paraphrase St. Augustine, we all have a God-shaped hole in our lives – and that shape is a triangle. It can only filled by the Holy Trinity of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, one God in three persons, blessed Trinity.
Our gospel reading for today says that as the disciples worshipped Jesus, some doubted. This doesn’t mean they were rejecting Jesus. They weren’t. It just means they had a hard time taking in everything they had seen and heard. But Jesus was patient with them. He kept teaching them. He preached a word to them that moved their hearts from doubt to trust.
You don’t need to understand everything about the Holy Trinity or the Athanasian Creed. In fact, you can’t understand it. Not completely. There may well be parts that make your head hurt, parts you can’t quite take in. But by trusting in Jesus, by trusting in the triangle-shaped words of Holy Scripture, by trusting in the God who reveals himself to us as a Holy Trinity, you can find something better than mere understanding. You find a strong foundation for your life. You find a God strong enough to hold you up, no matter what. You find that triangle-shaped hole in your life to be filled with the grace of Jesus and with love of God and with the communion of the Holy Spirit. You find a strong promise assuring you that this powerful, loving, forgiving, life-giving triune God will be with you always, even to the end of the age.
Thanks be to God. Amen.
Rev. Jeffrey R. Spencer
Oak Harbor Lutheran Church
